• 4/10/2002 FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT Afghanistan - America's Blind Eye
• 7/31/2002 WORLD IN FOCUS Interview with Michael Ware
• 3/24/2003 PM Ceremony held in northern Iraq for Paul Moran
• 7/26/2004 ENOUGH ROPE
• 9/14/2004 7:30 Hostage claim could be genuine, journalist says
• 9/23/2004 LATELINE 'No hope' for British hostage

One day early in 2007, Col. Bill Rapp, Petraeus's closest advisor, was in his office watching CNN's Michael Ware, a reporter he respected, discuss the state of the war. The correspondent gloomily said to his colleague Anderson Cooper that "it just doesn't seem that there's any road forward that does not involve the spilling of so much innocent blood or the abandonment of so many of the principles that we of the West hold dear."

Col. Rapp, who was already worried, "trying to figure if we needed to get out of Dodge," was so struck by the comment that he wrote it down. Then he picked up a marker and copied it onto the big erasable white board he used with his subordinates to brainstorm. "I wrote it down as a challenge to myself and the CIG [commander's initiatives group] to help the CG [commanding general] find an alternative. Those days were fairly bleak."

Their job as the brains behind Petraeus, he instructed them, was "to prove Mick Ware wrong." Rapp's deputy, Charlie Miller, arriving in Iraq in February 2007, estimated the chances of success at 10 to 15 percent. By May he considered himself a relative optimist and raised his guess to 35 to 40 percent. It was better but still far from a safe bet.

GPS features Kotak Mahindra Bank vice-chair Uday S. Kotak, Egyptian Minister of Trade and Industry Rachid M. Rachid, French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde, Royal Dutch Shell CEO Jeroen van der Veer, CNN's Michael Ware, Iraqi Deputy PM Barham Saleh, Earth Institute's Jeffrey Sachs and Copenhagen Consensus' Bjorn Lomborg (CNN, SUN, 1pm).